A Native Network in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

When Elizabeth Weatherford was asked to organize a film series at the Museum of the American Indian in New York in the summer of 1979, she expected it to be a one-off event. But Ms. Weatherford, who taught visual and feminist anthropology at the School of Visual Arts, found such a wealth of material about Native American experiences that she decided to start a biennual festival.
The 13th Native American Film + Video Festival opens tonight with “The Journals of Knud Rassmussen,” a feature film directed by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, the team behind the critically praised 2001 film “The Fast Runner.”
In the 27 years since the festival began, the museum has gone through many transitions –– including a name change, when it was incorporated into the Smithsonian Institution in 1989. In 1999, the museum opened a $50 million storage and research facility in Maryland to house its vast collections. In 2004, the new National Museum of the American Indian opened on the Mall in Washington, to much hoopla and some charges that it was neglecting scholarship and was too focused on celebrating Native American culture, rather than representing it in its complexity.
In an effort to strike a better balance, the museum recently launched a research department, run by José Barreiro, a former editor at Indian Country Today. “It’s meant to strengthen comprehensive scholarship in the museum,” Mr. Barreiro said of the department, which has so far hired six scholars. “I don’t subscribe to the idea that there was not adequate scholarship before,” he said. “We have to play a balancing role: We can’t afford to be dismissive of science, and we can’t afford to be dismissive of the oral traditions that people carry.”
The museum’s director since 1989, W. Richard West Jr., announced recently that he would resign next fall. The Smithsonian’s deputy secretary, Sheila Burke, is heading the search for his successor.
Through all of this, the museum has kept a New York presence. It was founded in New York in 1916 by George Gustav Heye, a passionate collector of Native American artifacts. Until 1989, it occupied a cramped building at 155th Street and Broadway, and its collections –– comprising more than 800,000 objects –– were stored in the Bronx. In 1989, a compromise between Sens. Moynihan of New York and Inouye of Hawaii simultaneously incorporated the museum into the Smithsonian and moved its New York location to the former U.S. Custom House, on the southern tip of Manhattan. (Moynihan and others had sought to move the museum to the Custom House for many years; as part of their lobbying efforts, the original 1979 film series was held there.)
The New York branch, now called the George Gustav Heye Center, presents — in addition to exhibits from the museum’s collection — performances, workshops, and daily film screenings. In September, it unveiled a $5 million renovation of the elliptical space beneath the Custom House rotunda. Now called the Diker Pavilion, after its main sponsors, Valerie and Charles Diker, the 6,000-square-foot space includes both room for more exhibitions and a performance area that can seat 400 people.
The Heye Center currently welcomes 300,000 visitors a year, and its director, John Haworth, says he expects attendance to increase in the coming years, as new museums open downtown and that harbor area becomes a destination.”Historic Battery Park is going through a major face-lift,” he added, “and there’s the River to River Festival. I think we’re going to see our visitation grow and grow.”
In addition, the American Indian Community House, a nonprofit that offers health and social services and cultural events to Native Americans in New York, is in the process of moving from its location in NoHo to just down the street from the Custom House, which will make the neighborhood something of a hub for Native American cultural activity. (There are 87,000 American Indian and Alaskan native people in the New York area.) The executive director of the Community House, Rosemary Richmond, was honored last night at a private event at the Film + Video Festival.
Both the museum’s film festival and the community of Native American filmmakers have grown hugely in the last quarter century, Ms. Weatherford said. In the late 1970s, she said, there were only about 10 active Native American film directors, so she showed many works by non-native directors. “Today, there are hundreds of Native [American] filmmakers,” she said. “Approximately 90% of the festival’s works are by Native directors and producers.” This year, for the first time, the festival received more than 500 submissions for 125 slots.
Behind the scenes, the festival serves as a kind of convention for this large cohort. Today and tomorrow, there will be salons, workshops with producers, and opportunities for the filmmakers to meet representatives from places like P.O.V. (the PBS program for independent film) and from NativeVoices, a master’s program at the University of Washington dedicated to Native American documentary.
The film festival, like the museum itself, encompasses North, South, and Central America. This year’s films include “Mohawk Girls,” Tracey Deer’s documentary about three young women growing up on a reservation outside Montreal; Mari Corrêa and Kumaré Txicão’s “My First Contact,” about the first meeting, in the 1960s, between the Ikpeng of Brazil and white people; and a world premiere of Bennie Klain’s short fictional film, “Share the Wealth,” about a Navajo woman in an American city.
The Native American Film + Video Festival continues through Sunday at the George Gustav Heye Center at One Bowling Green. All screenings are free (as is admission to the museum), although reservations are recommended for evening programs.